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potential bet on self-driving cars in the future - you'd want higher fidelity maps for those.

Also, they can get more accurate navigation for pedestrians etc.

Overall, IMHO, this is an investment in user experience.

I don't think the fidelity here is high enough for self driving vehicles, but the expertise built-up in the process would pave way for next steps.

Agreed, but also we don't know what exactly Apple (and also Google) is collecting - Apple Maps might only have subset of their data.

Not to mention, having a good way to build realistic virtual environment for acceptance testing is probably key here to enable self-driving.